Reasearch Hit: Your Brain is Better at Detecting Deep Fakes Than You Are!

Your brain registers deep fakes even when you consciously don’t

But surely if your brain can detect a deep fake, then you consciously should be able to also?

That would be logical, but there are numerous studies showing that our brain has responded to something but that our consciousness is behind. This applies to things like pattern detection or decision making also.

This paper just out by Yang et al. who investigated response and ability to discriminate AI generated voices known as deep fakes — i.e. fakes that are very realistic.

And this is very relevant in the current age with AI swarming into our everyday lives and many positive and negative ways?

Precisely. The ability to differentiate between fake and real has arguably never been more relevant than today.

What did the researchers find?

For this study the researchers tested 30 participants on real and AI generated voices and the ability to distinguish between them. But the interesting part is they did this exercise and then underwent training to distinguish the deep fakes and were then retested.

And there is a bit of a surprise here. First they discovered that we, or these participants at least, were bad at discriminating between real and deep fake voices. Maybe unsurprising with current technology (I would have thought there would have been a slight better ability for the real voices).

Second that the training did not improve conscious ability to recognise these deep fakes!

However, and this is the important takeaway, is that with the training the neural signature did change, showing that the brain at least seemed to be responding differently to the AI deep fakes. This shows that there is a difference.

This difference is extremely subtle with very small changes in tone or modulation — but the brain was processing these subtle changes.

But could we therefore learn to differentiate?

Possibly. Though the training in this study didn’t show any improvements, it was only a short training and maybe with extended or continual training this would improve conscious identification.

My assumption is that with extended training this could certainly be improved — us human beings can spot surprising subtle features in many contexts. But we do need the exposure and practice to do this.

It seems like the conscious brain needs time to catch up with our subtle brain processing — it could also be something only those with good internal awareness will be good at!

Here’s hoping that I can learn to spot deep fakes!

Me too!

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Originally published on my Substack

Reference

Jinghan Yang, Haoran Jiang, Yanru Bai, Guangjian Ni and Xiangbin Teng Short-Term Perceptual Training Modulates Neural Responses to Deepfake Speech But Does Not Improve Behavioral Discrimination eNeuro 9 March 2026, 13 (3) ENEURO.0300–25.2026 https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0300-25.2026